Setting the initial value for Django's ModelChoiceField

Recently, I worked with a Django form that utilized the ModelChoiceField. That is a convenient field that normally is rendered as an HTML select tag, which usually appears as a drop-down menu on a web-page.

A ModelChoiceField is specified as:

    class MyForm(forms.Form):
        my_field = forms.ModelChoiceField(queryset = MyModel.objects.all())

As you can see, this field is used to easily specify a drop-down for all items in a table (or whatever the queryset specifies). The model is represented as the output of its __unicode__() function. If you evaluate the form after it was posted, the value for the field is going to be an instance for the actual model whose unicode representation was selected.

The problems for me started when I tried to set an initial value for the field: In an 'edit' form, I wanted all fields to reflect whatever had been saved for a particular model instance, of course. As I said above, if you evaluate the form after it has been submitted you get an actual model instance. Naturally, you would think that initial values would be set in a symmetric manner, by specifying a model instance:

    form = MyForm(initial = { 'my_field' : some_model_instance })

Sadly, this doesn't work. And try as I might, I couldn't find an answer to this on the Internet either (more on that in a moment). So, after looking at the Django code, it finally dawned on me that you need to specify the ID of the model instance as the initial value:

    form = MyForm(initial = { 'my_field' : some_model_instance.id })

That works now. It's a bit unfortunate that the retrieval value (a model instance) and the initial value (the ID of a model instance) are of a different type. It's an inconsistency in the Django API, I think. But in the end, I probably should have at least tried that one a bit sooner.

The surprising thing is that I couldn't find any discussion of this anywhere on the Internet. I should mention here that I am using Yahoo as my default search engine. Shortly after I finally found the solution, it occured to me to try Google. And wouldn't you know it? Right there, third hit from the top, I had the answer.

Why did Yahoo not give me this result? Well, the answer was discussed on Google Groups. Is Yahoo not indexing those? Or is Google not letting them index it?

Either way, that small issue between Yahoo and Google cost me a few hours of frustration. So, I'm posting the solution here on a non-Google page, so that Yahoo users may also find the answer to that problem in the future.


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